


You Are Alive

by faithfultomonsters



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s01e10 Buffet Froid, Gen, I couldn't stop imaging the rest of Will's Bad Night so I wrote this, Mental Instability, Tagged to be safe, Will Graham Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-06-25 04:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19738318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithfultomonsters/pseuds/faithfultomonsters
Summary: “Let me get you some water,” Will said to Georgia, her eyes sharp and bewildered and shining in the grimy confusion of her face, “and then I really need to make a call.”Will Graham woke up one night to Georgia Madchen hiding under his bed. The rest of his night wasn’t any easier.





	You Are Alive

Will Graham embraced Georgia Madchen in the darkness of his bedroom, clad only in boxers and a sweat-drenched shirt, until he memorized the feel of her grimy, greasy hair. The tremor in her bones evened out enough that maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t try to kill him. He stepped back slowly.

It was the middle of the night. He could have been shivering in the pre-dawn chill but he felt warm. His shirt was damp, still. He felt exposed, underdressed in his own bedroom. Georgia stared at him.

He should be afraid.

He wasn’t. Tense, yes, because a killer had been _hiding under his bed_ and fuck if that wasn’t going to be fueling his nightmares for years to come. He had nightmare fuel to spare. He had enough nightmare fuel to drive for miles, for driving the miles he was walking in his sleep, for driving away from crime scenes and Jack and ghosts. Driving and hoping the engine wouldn’t combust, hoping the fire would spare him, all the while his dreams showed him the stag’s antlers piercing Georgia while everything burned. Killers and bodies in daylight and in darkness their shadows, silhouettes left like coffee rings staining a wood table. Fire casting shadows at night when he was sleepwalking to the edge of his roof or miles down the road. Fire to guide him, to warm him, heat that burned him up and at the end of it all-

A killer was hiding under his bed, and now he knew she wasn’t going to kill him (because he understood her, he understood her fully and without reservation, no space in his head for himself with how fully her understood her) he needed to do something.

“Let me get you some water,” Will said to Georgia, her eyes sharp and bewildered and shining in the grimy confusion of her face, “and then I really need to make a call.”

* * *

“Will?” It sounded like he’d woken him up.

“Jack. It’s me.” Will didn’t know what his voice sounded like. _It’s me, and there’s a girl in my room who thinks she’s dead and she’s done horrible things, and now she’s holding a glass of water on my sofa while my dogs all stare at her. There’s a dead girl who was hiding under my bed and I’m cracking up, Jack._

“What happened? Something with the case?” To his credit, Jack sounded like he’d woken up significantly in the time it took to register that a call from Will Graham in the middle of the night wouldn’t be about workplace gossip.

Will cleared his throat. Over his shoulder, Georgia was staring straight ahead, holding the water motionlessly. She wasn’t drinking it. She didn’t set it down.

“I’ve got Georgia,” he said in lieu of anything that would actually explain the situation.

“You what- where are you?”

“At my house.”

The sounds of Jack moving around came through the line. “What the hell, Will?”

Will sighed. “Just bring an ambulance.”

* * *

Jack did. He also brought a SWAT team, the entire BAU unit, the local police department, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Will appreciated all of these to varying degrees, the SWAT team not at all and Hannibal the most.

Jack opened with questions and Will offered answers only as he could. When he said that she’d been hiding under his bed, Jack’s eyebrows rocketed up to his hairline. Will grimaced and kept his eyes away from his scrutinizing stare. “Is that so,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.

Will’s home, normally an oasis of isolation and peace in theory if not in practice at the mercy of Will’s shit brain, was swamped with personnel and surrounded by police tape. The BAU team was inside somewhere, probably lifting DNA from his floorboards and scrutinizing the titles on his bookshelves. It hadn’t occurred to Will to tidy up before company arrived, considering the murderer sitting in his living room (not that he was one to talk, the ghost of Garrett Jacob Hobbs reminded him) but now he was starting to wish he’d at least made sense of his sweat-drenched sheets.

Georgia was long gone, taken in by firm voices with loaded guns at the ready. His house, on the other hand, was hosting unwanted guests. It felt like Will was hosting a party he hadn’t been invited to. The kind of party where he’d have to pick up the beer cans and liquor bottles by himself, and find solo cups in odd places for weeks afterwards. He’d never enjoyed parties like that, but he’d had college roommates that frankly couldn’t care less about what he wanted. He tried to imagine what would have happened if he’d wound up talking a serial killer out from under his bed in the college dorms and only managed to come up with the image of his college roommates rooting through his current possessions, snickering every few minutes and refusing to tell him why.

“Will,” Jack snapped, sounding like he’d already said Will’s name a couple of times and was one iteration away from losing his temper or bodily hurling Will in the direction of the nearest psychiatrist.

Will jolted a little. “What?”

“Are you with me, Will?”

No. “Yeah.” Fuck. “What were you saying?”

Jack gave Will a look that was difficult to decipher – somewhere between _are you fucking with me_ and _is this something I ought to be legitimately concerned about_ – and Will did his best to look like someone who fit in their own skin and hadn’t been woken up by a serial killer in the past two hours. He didn’t know if it was working or not, but Jack plowed ahead nevertheless.

“I’m saying I want to know everything that happened here, Will.”

There was a dry, dry aching behind Will’s eyes. It was like his eyes were wood, rolling around in wood sockets without varnish, just scraping against the backdrop-

“There’s not a lot to tell,” Will said. “I woke up in the middle of the night. My dogs were making noise, and I lay awake for a moment listening and thinking before I realized that Georgia Madchen was,” and here Will had to stop for a moment. The long, steady line of the horizon drew his eye. This late at night the horizon was defined entirely by the darkness where the earth cut off the stars. Trees and their branches blocked the stars in reaching lines, divvying up the light between the forks of wood. The cold air was a relief. Will might have been sweating again.

“Will.”

“She was under my bed.” He didn’t look at Jack. He didn’t think he could take whatever look Jack was giving them right now, not in the middle of all this, especially not in light of their little argument outside of the house of Georgia Madchen’s last murder.

If he told Jack now and got it over with, maybe he could try to go back to sleep.

“There was nothing that gave her away, but I could – tell. That she was under my bed. So I jumped down all of a sudden, so I was on her level and looking at her, and I told her that she was alive. It was what she needed to hear. Then after that it wasn’t too hard to talk her out from under my bed.”

His words sounded mechanical, even to him. His voice was dry and without inflection. He sounded like shit. Probably looked like it, too. He kept his eyes fixed away from Jack. The lights from his porch cast black shadows against warm yellow light on the wood floorboards.

“And then?”

“I gave her a glass of water.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“I didn’t,“ Will cut off, ran his hands over his face. “I don’t know what to do with visitors.”

“So you give them water.”

“Apparently.”

“Even when they’re serial killers.”

“Apparently.” Will sighed. “She’s not – I mean, she didn’t know what she was doing when she killed Beth LeBeau. She might not even know now.”

Jack looked like he was preparing to ask another question Will wouldn’t want to answer when Hannibal stepped into the porch light beside Will, just as well-dressed and alert as if it was the middle of the day and not some unmerciful nocturnal hour.

Will jolted a little, but neither Hannibal nor Jack blinked.

“Hannibal!” Jack barked. “It’s good to see you.”

“These circumstances are unpleasant but usual,” Hannibal said, eyes tracking across the scene, likely looking for either Georgia or a dead body, before scanning up and down Will. His attention was a familiar, piercing weight that left Will feeling centered and somehow more real. Whatever he saw made his gaze focus. Hannibal turned to Jack. “If I may borrow Will, for a moment?”

“Oh, you’re borrowing me now?” Will said under his breath as they stepped into the yard. The lights of various emergency vehicles provided uneven lighting across the planes and angles of Hannibal’s face. A small smile twitched across Hannibal’s mouth. He regarded Will with something Will would almost call affection, or amusement.

“Letting Uncle Jack think I need to ask his permission to talk to you throws him off our scent,” Hannibal said, humor evident in his tone. Will let a tired laugh escape him. The night was starting to take on a surreal quality. The people, the place, the time. Will, untethered.

This was not the first time Will had been sought out by a murderer – Freddie Lounds’s writing had driven Stammets to him months ago. But this was the first time something so personal as Will’s house had been violated. The space underneath his bed, no less. It was like being a child again, watching for the improbably monsters and finding them closer than expected, empathizing with the thing he was supposed to fear.

There was always the fear.

There was also, pushing aside the fear, Hannibal, and his pressed appearance completely at odds with the casual, almost intimate way he pressed a hand to the side of Will’s face and leaned in to look Will in the eyes.

“Tell me what happened,” Hannibal said. Will did.

He didn’t try to keep it short the way he had for Jack. At the end of it all, Will looked up from his feet, where his gaze had slipped around the time he first mentioned his dogs, and back at Hannibal, fearing the same thing he’d feared after Tobias Budge.

What he found was a calm, steady regard. “Taking in more strays, Will?” Hannibal said, and Will breathed out slowly.

Will felt, once again, a rush of warm gratitude that Hannibal was not put off by his patient who saw strange visions and showed up at his office sweating and panicked. If he looked into Hannibal’s eyes and saw fear, that might break him. He was starting to feel the cold now, seeping past his jeans and sockless feet shoved inside old shoes. He was starting to think about tomorrow and the conversations that would be had, and how long it would take for everyone to leave his house and the things that people would be saying. He was starting to feel the lack of sleep from tonight and every other night pressing into his mind, creating a kaleidoscope of misery that took on new colors and dimensions the longer he looked. He wasn’t sure if he was shivering or trembling or just imagining all of it, whether shock or cold or his own instability was working against him in this moment and every other.

Will stood in the darkness, watching the red emergency lights of a police car play with the shadows across Hannibal’s face, and let the warmth of Hannibal’s hand on his face keep him, for this moment if none other, present and whole.


End file.
